Surprise! There is no Constitutional authority for tax on anything except business profits, plus specific “indirect” taxes on gasoline, tobacco, etc. By numerous Supreme court decisions, wages and salaries are non-taxable “profitless” exchanges of services for money or other considerations. (Even the non-state-ratified 16th Amendment couldn't change this.)

Deduct 100% of your earnings, and challenge IRS to show the authorizing legislation for taxing them. They have never been able to respond to such challenges, and have in recent years lost about 22 out of 22 jury trials on the subject.

Here’s the bigger picture:

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The Sixteenth Amendment (Amendment XVI) to the United States Constitution was ratified on February 3, 1913. This Amendment allows the Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the States or basing it on Census results. 42 of 48 states ratified the amendment.

If you follow these ideas you could end up in prison for years.

3 states reported as ratifying actually did not:
KN, TN, WY. 7 additional states have no or imperfect legislative records of ratification: DE, MI, NH, NV, SD, TX, VE. 5 lack gubernatorial or other signature, as required: ID, IA, MN, MO, WA.
Those 15 are enough to sink it, but in all but 2 other states there are other violations of state procedural or Constitutional requirements, and/or alterations of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, which also render the "ratified" versions invalid.

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"fraud was deliberate and pervasive throughout the four-year long amending process. As a single example, consider Kentucky’s resolution on the 16th Amendment which was recorded by the Secretary of State as having passed the amendment on a vote of 22 to 9. In fact, the source historical record shows that Kentucky’s resolution was rejected on a vote of 22 to 9, thereby voiding the 16th Amendment, which Philander Knox alleged had been passed with only a two-state margin."

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" * The Oklahoma Senate amended the language of the 16th Amendment to have a precisely opposite meaning.
* The California legislative assembly never recorded any vote upon any proposal to adopt the amendment proposed by Congress.
* The State of Minnesota sent nothing to the Secretary of State in Washington."

The issue is now before the 7th Court of Appeals, and a decision is expected sometime before March 2010.

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The US Supreme Court has already decided this issue. Brushaber v. Union Pacific R.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916)

“Thomas is a tax protester, and one of his arguments is that he did not need to file tax returns because the sixteenth amendment is not part of the constitution. It was not properly ratified, Thomas insists, repeating the argument of W. Benson & M. Beckman, The Law That Never Was (1985). Benson and Beckman review the documents concerning the states’ ratification of the sixteenth amendment and conclude that only four states ratified the sixteenth amendment; they insist that the official promulgation of that amendment by Secretary of State Knox in 1913 is therefore void.

“Benson and Beckman did not discover anything; they rediscovered something that Secretary Knox considered in 1913. Thirty-eight states ratified the sixteenth amendment, and thirty-seven sent formal instruments of ratification to the Secretary of State. (Minnesota notified the Secretary orally, and additional states ratified later; we consider only those Secretary Knox considered.) Only four instruments repeat the language of the sixteenth amendment exactly as Congress approved it. The others contain errors of diction, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. The text Congress transmitted to the states was: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Many of the instruments neglected to capitalize “States,” and some capitalized other words instead. The instrument from Illinois had “remuneration” in place of “enumeration”; the instrument from Missouri substituted “levy” for “lay”; the instrument from Washington had “income” not “incomes”; others made similar blunders.

“Thomas insists that because the states did not approve exactly the same text, the amendment did not go into effect. Secretary Knox considered this argument. The Solicitor of the Department of State drew up a list of the errors in the instruments and--taking into account both the triviality of the deviations and the treatment of earlier amendments that had experienced more substantial problems--advised the Secretary that he was authorized to declare the amendment adopted. The Secretary did so.

“Although Thomas urges us to take the view of several state courts that only agreement on the literal text may make a legal document effective, the Supreme Court follows the “enrolled bill rule.” If a legislative document is authenticated in regular form by the appropriate officials, the court treats that document as properly adopted. Field v. Clark, 143 U.S. 649, 36 L.Ed. 294, 12 S.Ct. 495 (1892). The principle is equally applicable to constitutional amendments. See Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130, 66 L.Ed. 505, 42 S.Ct. 217 (1922), which treats as conclusive the declaration of the Secretary of State that the nineteenth amendment had been adopted. In United States v. Foster, 789 F.2d. 457, 462-463, n.6 (7th Cir. 1986), we relied on Leser, as well as the inconsequential nature of the objections in the face of the 73-year acceptance of the effectiveness of the sixteenth amendment, to reject a claim similar to Thomas’. See also Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433, 83 L. Ed. 1385, 59 S. Ct. 972 (1939) (questions about ratification of amendments may be nonjusticiable). Secretary Knox declared that enough states had ratified the sixteenth amendment. The Secretary’ decision is not transparently defective. We need not decide when, if ever, such a decision may be reviewed in order to know that Secretary Knox’ decision is now beyond review.”